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Pacific

September 16, 2025
He came out to LA to be an actor and ended up a dishwasher, something he’d made peace with by now, having tired of auditioning long ago. It hadn’t been, after all, the reality of acting that had infatuated him. He could see that now. He didn’t want to pretend to be other people, but...

The Scream-Room 

August 26, 2025
There’s a room upstairs I could write in. A desk by the window, a little red chair.  “It’s perfect,” my husband says, “so long as you remember not to shut the door.”  That’s what the owners told us when we moved in. “But why?” I asked, until they showed me.  They shut the door. The...

MY GRANDMOTHER, THE DOG, THE FRENCHMAN, THE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE, AND ME 

August 26, 2025
When I was sixteen, and my grandmother seventy-six, she caught a bad cold, which turned into pneumonia, and died. At the funeral, which was filled with countless offspring, relatives, and offspring of relatives, my oldest cousin, who was weeping very hard indeed, got up to speak. She spoke about how our grandmother had gotten along...

Accomplishments

March 11, 2025
When she was in fifth grade, Jennifer set the world record for Most Pogo Stick Jumps in One Minute. At age twelve, she swam the state’s best time for the 100-meter butterfly (Girls, 11–12 years old), a record that still stands today. She graduated high school a year early, was class valedictorian, and got accepted...

Angel Soft

March 11, 2025
He could ditch the whole damn pack, right here in the dumpster behind Circle K. All twelve rolls, plastic wrapped. He could walk home in peace. Well, at least with that dignity Coach is always going on about: Chin up, both on and off the field. Whether you played in Friday’s game or not. No...

The Wounds of the Tongue that Home Could Not Heal 

February 17, 2025
She could not pinpoint exactly when she’d first started seeing It again. Maybe last Tuesday or Wednesday? What she could remember was how It looked, etched in hard water on the silver bathtub faucet. Or maybe that was not the first time she’d seen It again, maybe she’d seen It before, though she could not...

Dark Side of the Moon 

February 17, 2025
We’re in the middle of an overpass crossing a stretch of the Northwestern railroad when they say the Moon has gone off its orbit. The voices on the radio croak through the static, by turn lost and agitated. Danny and Lina are up in front, and I’m in the backseat, wedged between a suitcase and...

The Silverware Thief

February 4, 2025
She did not steal the good silverware.   No, they agreed that he’d keep the six-piece, eight-setting dinnerware set and she’d keep the silverware—which, unlike the plates, cups, and bowls, could be packed into one small flat box. He said he was happy with the arrangement. She was the one who’d chosen both for the wedding...

For We Are Many 

February 4, 2025
The mob carries pitchforks. They carry shovels. And torches. So many torches. What will the mob do with all of these torches? We do not know.  One man seems to hold aloft three torches, but, when we squint, we see that what he holds is, in fact, a candelabra, which is either a relief or,...

Lulu Demented

January 13, 2025
And her mother is in the room. Eyes like tortoise shells, the brown inlaid with green. Around the iris, those stripes of yellow. Lulu has not seen her in years, yet here she is with brown lunch sack in hand. Its paper crinkles and cracks. Lulu says, “Mama, I’m sick. I can’t go to school.”...

Vestito Rosso

January 13, 2025
MOM kept the recipe for her red sauce on a notecard in the top cupboard where she couldn’t reach without a chair. She made the sauce every time we came to visit, and every time she’d point to the cupboard and tell us not to tell anyone. It was a recipe that her own mom...

Gravel Pit

October 29, 2024
After she fails a biology test, a boy tells her not to worry about it and brings her out behind the school. He shows her how the gravel pit is eating away at the grass behind the school and explains that soon the school is going to slide down the gullet of the gravel pit...